Terri Butler (Griffith, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Preventing Family Violence) Share this | Hansard source

While the assistant minister is answering the question from the previous questioner, perhaps she could answer me this: will the assistant minister come to my electorate and apologise to the more than 2,000 families who will be left worse off by the coalition's early learning changes? On a related front, will the assistant minister also commit to going back to the minister and having a pretty firm word with him about the fact that universal access funding for kindergartens has not been committed beyond the end of 2019?

The assistant minister is, I'm sure, aware of the uncertainty that this leaves early learning centres and community run kindergartens in. I certainly have kindies in my area. We all do. I visit my kindies on a regular basis, and they're very concerned about the fact they don't have funding certainty beyond the end of 2019. I'm pretty surprised, to be honest. Every year, I think this is going to be the year that the Liberals finally see sense and give a five-year funding commitment for universal access funding for kindies and preschools. Every year, I think this is going to happen. But no, it's always a one-year extension. This is not good enough. You know the importance of preschool and kindy.

Mr Van Manen interjecting—

Don't make excuses, Member for Forde. The member for Forde is making excuses for why you cannot fund early learning in this country. You go back to your electorate and tell all the parents in your electorate why you can't commit to universal access for kindy funding beyond the end of 2019. It's a question about funding. Maybe tell them why you're choosing to spend $80 billion on corporate tax handouts for the big end of town rather than to fund early learning and rather than to fund specifically the universal access funding for kindies that parents are going to rely on. Explain to them why the priority should be helping out your mates at the top end of town and not helping out the families in your electorate. I'd love to hear that conversation; I don't think it's going to go very well for you, frankly.

When I asked the minister some questions previously, I did ask about the MYEFO cuts to university funding—the $2.2 billion in cuts. I didn't really get much of an answer. Obviously, the assistant minister had other questions that she had to answer in the course of her earlier response, and they were important questions. But perhaps the assistant minister could give some thought to those $2.2 billion in cuts announced in December last year and baked into the budget in May this year, because, as I said earlier, Universities Australia calculated that that would mean about 9½ thousand places in 2018. It'll mean something similar in 2019. Of course, these cuts were announced in December, weren't they? By then, a lot of the universities had already made their offers for 2018. Most of them didn't renege on those and say, 'Actually, sorry, you can't have that place at uni that we told you you could have.' They had to find other ways to absorb the cuts, didn't they? I was saying before when a different Deputy Speaker was in the chair that I spoke to a university just this morning who said that they'd absorbed the funding cuts by cutting courses. That's not really a shock. It's what they had to do. They cut some courses. They cut some psychology courses, which I thought was particularly disappointing—courses that had been created to help teachers skill up in teaching science. I raise that specifically because the member for Bowman came in before and asked some questions about the National Innovation and Science Agenda. Cutting $2.2 billion from university funding is not really consistent with a commitment to the National Innovation and Science Agenda. It's pretty inconsistent with a commitment to that agenda. It's pretty inconsistent with a commitment to families. It's pretty inconsistent with a commitment to young people who are looking to the future and trying to work out what skills they will need for the jobs of the future. It's pretty inconsistent with a commitment to mature-aged people who are thinking about reskilling, retraining and getting better qualifications so that they can, as the Prime Minister today suggested, get a better job. And it's pretty inconsistent with a government wanting to do the best for the Australian economy, because, when you fund higher education, you're not just funding something that, together with international tourism, is our most important service export. You're funding something that makes a massive contribution to our economy domestically, because, of course, education is not just great for dealing with inequality, for helping with social mobility and for helping people to get ahead regardless of the circumstances of their birth. It's also great for making our future workforce and our current workforce more productive. It's great for making our firms more productive. It's great for the research that is done that also contributes to the Australian economy. So I ask the assistant minister to explain what will be done to reverse the impact of these terrible MYEFO cuts from last year.

See this speech in context